Fashioning the Modern Middle East

Gender, Body, and Nation

Reina Lewis, Yasmine Nachabe Taan

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Visual Arts
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781350135222
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia mediorientale

In the first book to address the critical role of the (un)dressed body in the formation of the modern Middle East, these essays unveil contemporary struggles over nation, gender, modernity and post-modernity. Contributions from leading interdisciplinary scholars, exploring gender representation, photography, dress and visual culture, recount the role of the visible elite body in campaigns for gender and social emancipation, dress histories concerning early nationalist women and men, and legal frameworks used by those who seek to control the movement of gendered bodies. The result is a rich picture of a historical period and cultural landscape which brings dress and visual culture back into historical narratives of the modern Middle East. Recognising multiple modernities, multiple imperialisms and diverse regional experiences of post-colonialism, Fashioning the Modern Middle East contains a range of theoretical frameworks invaluable to students of fashion studies, Middle Eastern studies, anthropology, photography and gender. Bringing forward new primary material and re-investigating extant sources from new perspectives, this is the essential introduction to the role of the dressed and undressed body in the formation of the modern Middle East.

CHAPTER 1

MAPPING MODERN BODIES IN THE MIDDLE EAST: INTRODUCTION

Reina Lewis and Yasmine Nachabe Taan

Introduction

This chapter introduces the reader to critical and historical terms used in the volume’s discussion of fashion as key to understanding the development of modernity in the Middle East from the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries. Our synoptic account covers significant changes in sovereignty in the context of competing European, Russian, and American imperial interests and the shifting power of Ottoman and Qajar Iranian imperial rule. We link historiographical approaches to multiple or “non-Western” modernities to the accelerating take-up of Western fashion and lifestyle commodities and related changes in Middle Eastern distributive trades. With sumptuary legislation remaining prevalent as a form of social order, our review of power elaborates the different forms of bodily governance across the region organized through the state, enacted by religious and ethnic communities, and exercised within the household. Our discussion of slavery explains the distinctions between the Islamicate and transatlantic models, and reveals how gendered and racialized relationships forged through slavery persisted into the twentieth century as a factor of household life and feature of the public consumptionscape. We delineate how codes of spatial segregation impacted on the organization of gender and sexuality for Muslims and non-Muslims alike. The awareness of European Orientalist stereotypes as a factor in changing attitudes to gender and sexuality across the region is considered in relation to the anti-degeneration drive of the Arab Awakening, or al-Nahda, and the shift in approaches to male and female beauty in Qajar Iran. With clothing operating as a marker of modernity, we outline state-mandated and individual processes in the selective adaptation of Western clothing styles for men alongside the changing significance of veiling and unveiling for women. As in Euro-America, moral concerns about women’s consumption focused especially on fashion and, as we discuss, created changing opportunities for income generation. We match processes in fusion fashion to regional engagement with emerging international methods of modern art production and dissemination, including the take-up of photography in the imaging of modernity for self and other. We conclude with an outline of individual chapter contents.

Rendering Bodies Modern in the Middle East¹

This volume demonstrates the many ways in which the dressed and undressed body played a central role in the formation and experience of modernities in the Middle East from the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries. Our perspective regards modernity as multiple; investigates the interaction of several imperialisms; and foregrounds the diversity of regional experiences of post-imperial polities and nation-state formation.

As Mitchell argues, addressing processes of being modern in the Middle East automatically relocates the question of modernity within a global context.² The study of modernity in the Middle East—as for other “non-Western modernities”—re-interrogates framing categories such as “Western,” “modern,” and “civilized”; exploring the local and regional specificities of how individuals and groups adhered to, changed, challenged, and navigated these framing concepts.³

In a fashion context where very few garments survive, our authors combine analysis of extant vestments with visual and literary representations of clothed and unclothed bodies. Their multi-disciplinary interventions reveal dynamic relations between cultural, economic, and social histories, engaging scholarship from history of art, photography, visual culture, and material culture studies. The book thus navigates different research protocols, periodizations, and hierarchies of value attributed to primary sources. Inter alia, we evaluate the role of collecting, archiving, and curation in the telling of women’s and gender history and histories of sexuality.

Our research melds regional and local contexts and histories onto theoretical paradigms developed (explicitly or implicitly) with other geographies in mind. Writing in the second decade of the twenty-first century, our authors—many themselves instrumental in the development of postcolonial theory, world history, and transnational fashion studies—reconsider orthodoxies emerging from first-round challenges to political, cultural, and scholarly Western-centrism.⁴ Comparative, inter-, and multi-disciplinary research treads beyond conventional boundaries, just as our readers come from dissimilar perspectives. To help, each author provides contextual information setting the stage for modern bodies and hence for modernizing societies across the Middle East over nearly a hundred years.

Like its near comparators “Near East,” and “Orient,” the category of “Middle East” has over many years delimited and described the Arab world including Turkey and the Persian Gulf region for scholarship, colonialism, and imperialism, as also for market penetration. Alert to its ideological functioning, the term nonetheless remains a working category for those studying the region’s lives and histories: for this book, the “Middle East” stretches across two continents to include territories in the countries now known as Egypt, Iran, Syria, Palestine, Lebanon, Turkey, and Sudan. Historiographically, our long durée permits us to track related processes of modernization and Westernization from their acceleration in the mid-1800s to their deployment in the shaping and representation of independent movements and nationalist cultures at the turn of the twentieth century. Within this, conventions of periodization vary by discipline, geography, and media.

The pre-history of this book’s fashion periodization reaches back to the eighteenth century when the rapid turnover of style seen as emblematic of the “modern” fashion system began to embed in European fashion production and media, with worldwide ramifications. Contrary to earlier renditions of modern fashion as a property of Western experience, scholarship now demonstrates related changes to fashion style, production, and mediation appearing quickly across the Middle East.⁵ Local dress cultures retained slower change cycles for longer, but engagement with imported Western fashions and textiles, and adaptations of conventional regional garments, are present from the eighteenth century. Our focus on the decades from the mid-nineteenth century captures an acceleration in impact across regional populations.

In fashion mediation, photography was in use in the Middle East soon after its invention in 1839, with growing take-up by local populations as affordability and availability increased.⁶ For fashion distribution, we trace how regional norms of peddlers and bazaars servicing gender segregated societies adapted to the advent of specialist fashion shops and department stores. Changes in distribution modes for fashion and lifestyle commodities and services were part of larger changes in the spatial organization of societies, including places for the display of art.

Our chapters consider the fluctuating vistas in which dressed bodies became visible to observers within changing modes of gender segregation in household and public spaces. In an Islamicate region,⁷ the cultural dominance of Islam structured social norms for Muslim and non-Muslim populations. In fashion terms, practices of veiling the face and obscuring the body with loose clothing functioned as indicators of social status (pre-Islamic in origin) rather than personal religious conviction; forms of class distinction for women in Armenian, Greek, and Jewish as well as Muslim communities.

Nonetheless, forms of affiliation based in religion did structure social classifications for women and men; at times determining place of habitation, clothing, occupation, and forms of governance. The predominance of non-Muslims in the distributive trades and forms of media such as photography provides an immediate riposte to the idea of the “Muslim world” as only inhabited by Muslims (then or now). Fashion does not operate outside of society, and the changes in political sovereignty brought about by imperial competition and the privations of war saw more Muslims and Muslim women finding employment in fashion and new ways to publicly present themselves as fashionable. Our volume offers insights into majority and minority populations through selected snapshots of regional significance and transnational consequence.

Authors focus on urbanized populations of the central Ottoman Empire and post-Ottoman Lebanon and Egypt, with one chapter on Iran and another on Sudan. Case studies analyze selected moments in which forms of dress and embodiment became critical indices within local, regional, and international debates about modernity and nation. Collectively we bring forth previously unseen primary sources and offer new readings of those better known, alert to the determining impact of social variations of religion, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and race. Gaps in scholarship remain for our period and we regret that we could not secure chapters on territories such as Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and the Gulf. Some social groups are more represented in research than others. Accordingly, we are proud to include chapters that throw new light on experiences of slavery, contributing to scholarship on Islamicate slave societies.⁸ We look forward to future research on how dress and undress factored in the formation and experience of rural, tribal, and peasant communities. And we anticipate further insights on the role of dress and changing attitudes to the body in modernizing apparatuses in health, education, prison, and the military.⁹ For dress histories and histories of sexuality, we bring fresh information on elite women’s practices of gender-cross dressing, and supply consumption studies with new ways to perceive local practices of transnational fashion, along with attention to everyday as well as special occasion wardrobe construction.

Our volume benefits from the digitized increase in primary sources.¹⁰ Our decision to go wide in period and location reveals recurrences of places, historical persons and social roles, fashion developments, and primary sources. This results in a map of dress practices and fashioned subjects that we hope will provide new structures and methods for the broader understanding of the complex intra-imperial and transnational relations typical of the region and period.

Power: Governing the Body

Our comparative study covers a period in which sovereignty over territories changed dramatically in response to the conflicting relationships between European, Russian, and American imperial interests and the variable ability of Ottoman and Qajar Iranian imperial rule to withstand incursions from without and challenges from within. Dress and appearance were imbricated in the diverse structures of power inhering in the region and the different forms of resistance that met them. Legal frameworks seeking to control the movement of women’s and men’s bodies included methods of state governance sanctioned by the Ottoman and Iranian empires and post-Ottoman Egypt; replaced, adapted, or continued in the European mandates in Lebanon and Syria, and in post-Ottoman Turkey at the end of the First World War. Matched to this, and sometimes acting on behalf of the state, were the forms of governance enacted by religious and ethnic communities (with their own transnational affiliations). Finally, never least, were the gendered and sometimes racialized forms of household power exercised in societies organized on principals of gendered segregation: these impacted on soc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Contents 
• List of Figures
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Mapping Modern Bodies in the Middle East: Introduction
• 2 Fashion and the Camera: Istanbul in the Late Ottoman Empire
• 3 Training Slaves for the Camera: Race and Memory in Representations of Slaves, Cairo, and Khartoum, 1882–92
• 4 Patronage, Taste, and Power: Slave, Manumitted, and Free Subjects in the Fashioning of Middle Eastern Modernity
• 5 Constantin Guys and the Painters of Global Modernity
• 6 Looking At/As Nudes: A Study of a Space of Imagination
• 7 Another Look: “The Body That Is,” Gender, Sexuality, and Power in Post-Ottoman Egypt
• 8 The Arab Garçonne: Being Simultaneously Modern and Arab in 1920s and 1930s Palestine, Lebanon, and Egypt
• 9 The Photograph, the Dress, and the Conjugalization of the Family
• Bibliography
• Index
• Imprint